The oracle.jdbc.OracleDatabaseMetaData class along with
oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDatabaseMetaData implement the JDBC 3.0
DatabaseMetaData interface and in ojdbc6.jar and above,
the JDBC4.0 DatabaseMetaData interface.

Package oracle.jdbc Description

Beginning in Oracle9i, the Oracle extensions to JDBC are captured in the package oracle.jdbc. This package contains classes and interfaces that specify the Oracle extensions in a manner similar to the way the classes and interfaces in java.sql specify the public JDBC API.

Your code should use the package oracle.jdbc instead of the package oracle.jdbc.driver used in earlier versions of Oracle. Use of the package oracle.jdbc.driver is now deprecated, but will continue to be supported for backwards compatibility.

All that is required to covert your code is to replace "oracle.jdbc.driver" with "oracle.jdbc" in the source and recompile. This cannot be done piece-wise. You must convert all classes and interfaces that are referenced by an application. Conversion is not required, but is highly recommended. Future releases of Oracle may have features that are incompatible with use of the package oracle.jdbc.driver.

The purpose of this change is to enable the Oracle JDBC drivers to have multiple implementations. In all releases up to and including Oracle9i, all of the Oracle JDBC drivers have used the same top level implementation classes, the classes in the package oracle.jdbc.driver. By converting your code to use oracle.jdbc, you will be able to take advantage of future enhancements that use different implementation classes. There are no such enhancements in Oracle9i, but there are plans for such enhancements in the future.

Additionally, these interfaces permit the use of some code patterns that are difficult to use when your code uses the package oracle.jdbc.driver. For example, you can more easily develop wrapper classes for the Oracle JDBC classes. If you wished to wrap the OracleStatement class in order to log all SQL statements, you could easily do so by creating a class that wraps OracleStatement. That class would implement the interface oracle.jdbc.OracleStatement and hold an oracle.jdbc.OracleStatement as an instance variable. This wrapping pattern is much more difficult when your code uses the package oracle.jdbc.driver as you cannot extend the class oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatement.

Once again, your code should use the new package oracle.jdbc instead of the package oracle.jdbc.driver. Conversion is not required as oracle.jdbc.driver will continue to be supported for backwards compatibility. Conversion is highly recommended as there may in later releases be features that are not supported if your code uses oracle.jdbc.driver.